FreeNAS & TrueNAS Plans - 2020 and Beyond!

zizzithefox

Dabbler
Joined
Dec 18, 2017
Messages
41
That being said, the ZFSonLinux and the ZFSonLinuxonFreeBSD (combined into OpenZFS2.0) have a pretty good trackrecord inadapting to kernel changes from both BSD and Linux already for years.

By the way, I have to say I was pretty skeptical about ZFSonlinux because it's not developed with the kernel. I started using it in XCP-ng and so far so good. Not stellar performances but hey, old home servers with nvme drives in PCIe 2.x and sata2, so who cares. I have got lz4 compression without using an additional machine and iscsi... Very good for my pockets.

I am so waiting for the implementation of zstd in ZFS.
 

anmnz

Patron
Joined
Feb 17, 2018
Messages
286
I was pretty skeptical about ZFSonlinux because it's not developed with the kernel
Yeah because being included in the Linux kernel has been such a good guarantee of a filesystem's high quality and lack of disastrous data-destroying design failures. /s
 
Last edited:

zizzithefox

Dabbler
Joined
Dec 18, 2017
Messages
41
Well there is no guarantee of that sort. But certainly you don't get the problem of broken interfaces and most of the issues might affect other file systems. I would not have parts of a file system like zfs fail for a segfault or a race condition that might be seen by any c programmer.
 

anmnz

Patron
Joined
Feb 17, 2018
Messages
286
IMO it would be a terrible indictment of the Linux kernel and its module system if it were true that developing a filesystem or other kernel modules outside the main source tree automatically made you vulnerable to "a segfault or a race condition that might be seen by any c programmer". I don't buy it.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,175
Realistically, the situation is only as bad as the kernel developers make it. Even though some of them clearly have an axe to grind with ZFS and others suffer from debilitating NIH syndrome, ZoL has been doing pretty well for the most part.
 

danb35

Hall of Famer
Joined
Aug 16, 2011
Messages
15,456
only as bad as the kernel developers make it.
...and it seems some of them are trying really hard to make it really bad--and making simply idiotic public statements at the same time.
 

anmnz

Patron
Joined
Feb 17, 2018
Messages
286
TBH such statements sound to me less like idiocy and more like they come from living in a bit of an echo chamber.
 

danb35

Hall of Famer
Joined
Aug 16, 2011
Messages
15,456
less like idiocy and more like they come from living in a bit of an echo chamber.
Well, the latter often results in the former...
 

ornias

Wizard
Joined
Mar 6, 2020
Messages
1,458
Please also note that being included in the kernel also has downsides:
- Your project looses some of its autonomy, in the end the kernel maintainers could veto every change you make.
- You can't push updates to older versions of your module and can't push updates to older Linux kernels, this is a big one... OpenZFS supports A LOT of older Linux kernels and frequently pushes bugfixes for both older OpenZFS versions AND older Kernel versions.

I don't want to say kernel inclusion is bad, but there are also reasons not to from an OpenZFS point of view. I actually never heared OpenZFS core-maintainers and devs suggesting they even WANT kernel inclusion in the first place. It's often users themselves asking about it.
 

morsik

Cadet
Joined
Jun 23, 2020
Messages
0
I would definitely like to see FreeNAS working on Linux. FreeNAS is really great software that makes managing NFS/iSCSI NAS very simple on standard software.

But few days ago I went into bug in FreeBSD drivers in bnxt 10Gb network interfaces (BCM57416) which just doesn't work correctly. But no problem on Linux. For current hardware it would be better to use Linux because it gets driver updates faster.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

Hall of Famer
Joined
Nov 25, 2013
Messages
7,740
What is the bug you experience? Generally FreeBSD developers are approachable and respond in a friendly and timely manner.
 

Philip Robar

Contributor
Joined
Jun 10, 2014
Messages
116
But few days ago I went [sic] into bug in FreeBSD drivers...But no problem on Linux. For current hardware it would be better to use Linux because it gets driver updates faster.

Yeah, because it's not like there are any bugs in Linux's drivers. (-;

But seriously, I don't want to run my file server on a kernel for which the developers have decided to change all of the "this can't/shouldn't happen your data is almost certainly being corrupted" errors from aborts to warnings because it happens so often and fixing kernel bugs is just too hard. (Especially when, at the time, they didn't have a tool like dtrace.)
 

diskdiddler

Wizard
Joined
Jul 9, 2014
Messages
2,374
Realistically, the situation is only as bad as the kernel developers make it. Even though some of them clearly have an axe to grind with ZFS and others suffer from debilitating NIH syndrome, ZoL has been doing pretty well for the most part.

Can't remember which guy I was reading a quote from but yes at least one of the kernel devs really hates ZFS
 

Kris Moore

SVP of Engineering
Administrator
Moderator
iXsystems
Joined
Nov 12, 2015
Messages
1,448
Can't remember which guy I was reading a quote from but yes at least one of the kernel devs really hates ZFS

Everybody has their biases for one reason or another. A kernel dev may dislike ZoL because it can't go into mainline kernel tree. Same happens in the various BSD's as well, where they dislike something due to NIH or license, etc.
 

morganL

Captain Morgan
Administrator
Moderator
iXsystems
Joined
Mar 10, 2018
Messages
2,691
I would definitely like to see FreeNAS working on Linux. FreeNAS is really great software that makes managing NFS/iSCSI NAS very simple on standard software.

But few days ago I went into bug in FreeBSD drivers in bnxt 10Gb network interfaces (BCM57416) which just doesn't work correctly. But no problem on Linux. For current hardware it would be better to use Linux because it gets driver updates faster.

FreeNAS 11.3 on FreeBSD 11.3 is becoming TrueNAS 12.0 CORE on FreeBSD 12.0. This is in BETA and solves some of the driver issues. It would be useful to know if it doesn't solve the issues you've seen. TrueNAS SCALE then uses the TrueNAS 12.0 software and ports it to Debian Linux. Most of the NFS/SMB/iSCSI features are inherited and then more features (KVM, Docker, Scale-out) will be added. This may solve more of the less common driver issues. The NIGHTLY for TrueNAS SCALE is out .. would be interested to see if that solved any issues that TrueNAS CORE did not. However, TrueNAS SCALE is many months behind from a testing and quality perspective. Testing wanted and needed.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

Hall of Famer
Joined
Nov 25, 2013
Messages
7,740
FreeNAS 11.3 on FreeBSD 11.3 is becoming TrueNAS 12.0 CORE on FreeBSD 12.0.
FreeBSD 12.1 already. Your devs are tracking RELENG_12, not RELENG_12_0 :wink:
 

diskdiddler

Wizard
Joined
Jul 9, 2014
Messages
2,374
Besides the ZoL addition to TrueNAS 12 - is there any FreeBSD 12 fundamental changes which will be useful? Or signficiant?

I know that there's apparently some Bhyve changes?
 

Yorick

Wizard
Joined
Nov 4, 2018
Messages
1,912
Bhyve is improved, I’ve seen snappier performance with Win10. That said there is still at least one outstanding issue with bhyve terminating the VM when it reboots, that may get resolved in beta2, fingers crossed.

I’ve seen a PR for allowing PCIe passthrough in bhyve but don’t know whether it will make it into TrueNAS 12.0. That’d open up some use cases for sure, think GPU passthrough for Windows or such.

passing custom devfs rules into jails now works, the devfs bug where it would forget it had a custom rule is resolved

there’s a kernel bug in 11.3 that can impact SMB in corner cases (to do with Mac?), that’s resolved. You can search here to find what that was about, anodos commented on it.

Support for gen 8 and 9 Intel CPUs with iGPUs is in the 12.1 kernel, hw transcode on Plex with Coffee Lake CPUs should work.That’s very niche to be sure.

The kernel improves Ryzen support, though I confess I don’t know what “improve” means in detail.

I’m sure there’s more around driver and hardware support.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

Hall of Famer
Joined
Nov 25, 2013
Messages
7,740
VLANs would not work with bnxt(4) interfaces unless the interface was explicitly configured "promisc". That was fixed in FreeBSD ans so should be in TrueNAS 12.0.
 
Top